By Iain Davis and Whitney Webb
The United Nations claims that the purpose of Sustainable Development Goal 16 (SDG16) is to promote peaceful and inclusive societies and to provide access to justice for all. Hiding behind the rhetoric is the real objective: to strengthen and consolidate the power and authority of the “global governance regime” and to exploit threats—both real and imagined—in order to advance regime hegemony. In Part 2, Iain and Whitney examine the centrality of Digital ID (SDG 16.9) in this endeavour.
In Part 1 of our investigation into the United Nations’ (UN’s) Sustainable Development Goal 16 (SDG16) we revealed how the UN proclaims itself a “global governance regime.” We investigated the UN’s exploitation of so-called “human rights” as an authoritarian system of behavioural control permits, as opposed to any form of recognisable “rights.”
We examined how the UN uses what is calls the “policy tool” of human rights to place citizens (us) at the centre of international crises. This enables the UN and its “stakeholder partners” to seize crises as “opportunities” to limit and control our behaviour. The global public-private partnership (G3P), with the UN at its heart, redefines and even discards our supposed “human rights” entirely, claiming “crisis” as justification.
The overall objective of SDG16 is to strengthen the UN regime. The UN acknowledges that SDG16.9 is the most crucial of all its goals. It is, the regime claims, essential for the attainment of numerous other SDGs.
At first, SDG16.9 seems relatively innocuous:
By 2030, provide legal identity for all, including birth registration
But, as ever, when it comes to UN sustainable development, all is not as it initially appears.
SDG16.9 is designed to introduce a centrally controlled, global system of digital identification (digital ID). In combination with other global systems, such as interoperable Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), this can then be used to monitor our whereabouts, limit our freedom of movement and control our access to money, goods and services.
Universal adoption of SDG16.9 digital ID will enable the G3P global governance regime’s to establish a worldwide system of reward and punishment. If we accept the planned model of digital ID, it will ultimately enslave us in the name of sustainable development.
Digital ID As A Human Right
As we previously discussed, The UN underwent a “quiet revolution” in the 1990s. In 1998, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan stated that “the business of the United Nations involves the businesses of the world.”
Government’s reduced role was to create the regulatory “enabling environment” for private investors, alongside taxpayers, to finance what would become SDGs. Using the highly questionable “climate crisis” as an alleged justification, in 2015, the UN’s Millennium Development Goals gave way to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
On the 25th September 2015, UN General Assembly Resolution 70.1 (A/Res/70.1) formally established the SDGs by adopting the binding resolution to work towards “Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.”
As soon as the ink was dry on the resolution, the UN set about creating the enabling environment to encourage public-private partnerships to develop a system of global, digital ID. In May 2016, in response to SDG16.9, the United Nations Office for Partnerships convened the “ID2020 Summit – Harnessing Digital Identity for the Global Community.” This established the ID2020 Alliance.
The ID2020 Alliance is a global public-private partnership that has been setting the future course of digital identity since its founding. The global accountancy and corporate branding giant PwC was selected by the UN as the “lead sponsor” of the inaugural ID2020 summit in 2016. Excited about the opportunities digital ID would present, PwC described the ID2020 sustainable development objective:
[. . . .] to create technology-driven public-private partnerships to achieve the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goal of providing legal identity for everyone on the planet. [. . .] Specifically, ID2020’s mission aligns with development target 16.9, “Legal identity for all, including birth registration”. Thirty percent of the world’s population, approximately 1.5 billion people, lack a legal identity, leaving them vulnerable to legal, political, social and economic exclusion.
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Offering us digital ID to address so-called “economic exclusion,”—more on this shortly—the ID2020 Alliance duly launched in 2017 and set its Agenda2030 goal:
Enabling access to digital identity for every person on the planet.
You will note that the UN’s SDG16.9 makes no mention of global “digital ID.” Sustainable development, as it is presented to us, is nothing if not deceptive.
The ID2020 Alliance announced a “strategic, global initiative” for digital ID that presented humanity with a quite astonishing idea. The regime stated that the lack of “legal identity”—digital ID—prevented people from accessing “healthcare, schools, shelter, justice, and other government services,” thereby allegedly creating what it called “the identity gap.”
Empowered by the “global governance regime,” the ID2020 Alliance expanded on the idea that we are only permitted to live in “its” society if we can prove who we are, using its digital ID, to the satisfaction of the G3P regime.
The ID2020 manifesto states:
The ability to prove one’s identity is a fundamental and universal human right. [. . .] We live in a digital era. Individuals need a trusted, verifiable way to prove who they are, both in the physical world and online. [. . .] ID2020 Alliance partners jointly define functional requirements, influencing the course of technical innovation and providing a route to technical interoperability, and therefore trust and recognition.
SDG16.9 “sustainable development” means we must use digital ID that meets the functional requirements of the ID2020 Alliance partnership. Otherwise we will not be protected in law, service access will be denied, our right to transact in the modern economy will be removed, we will be barred from participating as “citizens” and excluded from so-called “democracy.”
This past August, ID2020 joined with the Digital Impact Alliance (DIA) to “push for digital transformation.” That said, ID2020 “joining” DIA is a bit of a misnomer, considering that both of these public-private partnerships are essentially run by the same organisations.
Speaking about the launch of its “partnership” with DIA, ID2020 founder John Edge, said:
[W]e established ID2020 to be a time-bound exploration of alternative systems for individuals to prove they exist.
In accordance with SDG16.9 “transformation,” if you don’t have the properly authorised digital ID then, as far as the regime is concerned, you don’t exist. As DIA explains, everyone must have “the trusted digital tools they need to fully participate in society.” If you don’t submit, you are literally nobody and thereby excluded from “society.”
The DIA calls its methodology “do[ing] digital right.” Its backers, such as the UN, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, USAID (widely believed to be a front for the CIA) and the UK and Norwegian governments, are all behind the DIA mission:
We use our expertise to influence the influential, encouraging the world’s largest investors and most effective policymakers to “do digital right”, emphasizing the importance of design, implementation, and governance.
Establishing global governance “with teeth” is the primary objective of the G3P regime, and “sustainable development” is its chosen mechanism to achieve its ambitions. As a regime partner, the DIA has been entrusted as the steward of the regime’s associated Principles for Digital Development.
Among these “principles” is the commitment to harvest as much human data as possible and to provide “the right people” with access to that data:
When an initiative is data driven, quality information is available to the right people when they need it, and they are using those data to take action.
The “world’s largest investors” are particularly encouraged to use their money tackle the alleged “identity gap” in least developed countries (LDCs) first. This will be achieved by prioritising investment in “cross-sectoral digital public goods and architecture.”
Very graciously, the G3P will “allow LDCs to be the stewards of their national digital agendas”—providing, of course, that they fully comply with the right “agenda.”
Given the cross-cutting nature of digital and its role in reaching all of the SDG targets, we believe that the current moment in time is ideally suited for such a “push” in LDCs.
The objective is to marshal “the necessary resources to fund and achieve national and global targets.” That is to say, LDC national governments are “allowed” to adopt “digital transformation” policies aligned to “global targets.”
There is no doubt that the ID2020 Alliance fully appreciates the implications of what it is doing. In a now quite infamous 2018 article, one of the founding partners of ID2020, Microsoft, published the following:
As more and more transactions become digital in nature and are built around a single global identification standard, supported by Microsoft, the question of who will govern this evolving global community and economy becomes relevant. Especially since non-participants in this system would be unable to buy or sell goods or services.
While the regime talks about “inclusion,” it is building a global digital ID system that is inherently exclusionary and can punish regime critics or silence dissident voices by cutting them off from its “society.” Being forced to use digital ID against your will is not a “right,” but it can be called a “human right” because, as defined by the UN, those are not rights, they are policy tools.
A global system of biometric digital ID can only become “essential” for all if it is made “essential.” There is no current necessity for it. The need has to be manufactured first. Hence the proclaimed “identity gap.”
Interoperability Is The Key
Biometric data records our “unique biological characteristics.” Fingerprints, iris-scans, DNA, facial recognition and voice-identification are all forms of biometric identifiers that can be stored digitally. Thales, the European defence and security contractor, explains how biometric data can be used for “biometric authentication”:
Biometric authentication compares data for the person’s characteristics to that person’s biometric “template” to determine resemblance. The reference model is first stored. The data stored is then compared to the person’s biometric data to be authenticated. [. . .] [I]ncreased public acceptance, massive accuracy gains, a rich offer, and falling prices of sensors, I.P. cameras, and software make installing biometric systems easier. Today, many applications make use of this technology.
Biometric digital ID is “mapped” to your physical ID. Thus, once we are coerced, forced or deceived into using it, we will always be identifiable on the planned surveillance grid.
Biometric ID is already commonly used around the world. In the UK for example, all driving licenses require machine readable photo ID; the Chinese government requires photo ID to purchase a SIM card or use the internet and has more recently moved toward issuing a national biometric digital ID card. So you may wonder why the G3P regime is developing new forms of biometric digital ID to meet SDG16.9.
Hitherto, all these disparate biometric ID systems have been managed by various national governments, their agencies and corporate partners, etc. Different forms of biometric digital ID are required for everything from license application and welfare claims, to accessing service or opening a bank account.
There is currently no unified, coherent international system of digital ID. This is a problem if you want to use it to exert centralised global governance control over “every person on the planet.”
The ID2020 Alliance was established to rectify the regime’s centralised authority problem. SDG16.9 enables ID2020 to claim legitimacy. For the people who think sustainable development has something to do with “saving the planet” or tackling the “climate emergency,” SDG16.9 is another untouchable “goal” and, therefore, must be implemented for the good of humanity.
ID2020 does not intend to stipulate the precise form of each national, regional or corporate ID card, nor every biometric data solution. Instead, by defining the “functional requirements” of all, the intention is to make every single one of these various digital ID products and services “interoperable.”
While each digital ID “solution” may have different design specifications, the biometric data they harvest will be machine readable in accordance with ID2020 technical standards. Thus, regardless of where or when the data is gathered, or by whom, it will be possible to create and maintain a single global biometric digital ID database.
As ID2020 states in its manifesto:
[. . .] widespread agreement on principles, technical design patterns, and interoperability standards is needed for decentralized digital identities to be trusted and recognized. [. . .] As such, ID2020 Alliance-supported pilots are designed around a common monitoring and evaluation framework.
Digital ID won’t necessarily be offered to all as a single “ID card”—or even as anything that appears to resemble a regime-controlled digital ID. Our SDG16.9 digital ID will instead be a composition of the data we share every day.
Private “vendors” of digital ID-based “solutions” will offer a “decentralised” range of products and services that people may adopt, perhaps without even realizing they are effectively committing to enter the regime’s digital ID network.
It will all depend upon the national government’s assessment of what their respective populations are willing to accept or are likely to reject. For example, people in China, familiar with concepts like “datong,” may be more amenable to accepting an official, government-issued digital ID compared to Westerners schooled in more libertarian traditions.
It should be noted that there is nothing “libertarian” about SDG16.9 digital ID. For populations that are stiffly opposed to government control, deception appears to be the preferred SDG16.9 “solution.” We will discuss that subject shortly.
ID2020 certification encourages the interoperability of the various digital ID products and services. It enables the “vendors” of digital IDs to “share a commitment to key principles for digital ID, but remain technology- and vendor-agnostic.”
The ID2020 Alliance recounts:
In January 2019, the Alliance launched the ID2020 Certification Mark at the World Economic Forum in Davos. ID2020’s Technical Advisory Committee (TAC), made up of leading experts on digital ID and its underlying technologies, established a set of functional, outcomes-based technical requirements for user-managed, privacy-protecting and portable digital ID.
With the net effect:
Through our Certification Mark, we shape the technical landscape to ensure that the digital ID solutions which are developed and adopted are user-managed, privacy-protecting and interoperable.
Interoperability is achieved through a digital ID platform’s compliance with the ID2020 Technical Requirements. Key Requirement 6.2 demands that all digital ID products and services:
Must support open APIs [application programming interfaces] for access to data and integration with components / vendors.
6.4 adds that digital ID systems:
Must be able to export the data in a machine-readable form. Data when exported, [. . .] should itself be provided in an open standard machine-readable format enabling ease of import into a new system/component.
The Founding “partners” of the ID2020 “Alliance” are Accenture, GAVI, IDEO, Microsoft and the Rockefeller Foundation. Their role is to establish the technical requirements for all digital ID “solutions” to enable the supposedly necessary, global “interoperability.”
Digital ID is not being implemented by “civil authorities” as the UN’s SDG indicator 16.9.1 deceptively suggests. Governments are merely the enabling and enforcement “partners” in the ID2020 – G3P. The design and functionality of global digital ID system is, and always was, led by the private sector.
The UN Digital Solutions Centre (UN DSC) has already established the digital ID framework for UN personnel. The regime has constructed “a suite of digital solutions that can be shared among UN Agencies.” This interoperability between all components of the “suite” enables the “personal, Human Resources, medical, travel, security, payroll and pension data” of UN workers to be centralised.
A modular “suite” of digital solutions that are “interoperable” is an important concept to grasp, as it effectively creates a single system of digital identity while giving the public the impression that there are instead many “decentralised” systems of digital identity. The ID2020 aim is not to create a single global digital ID system, but rather to construct a global network of interoperable digital ID “solutions” to feed the so-called “decentralised” data into a centralised global database.
The regime can then collate, analyse and exploit the harvested biometric data from a centralised, global command point. This will facilitate the global governance regime’s intention to surveil the Earth’s population. As yet, the universal biometric database hasn’t been officially announced, but the World Bank’s ID4D has emerged as a strong potential candidate.
The Global Interoperable Digital ID Database?
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